"You did good, Sharon Mueller," he told her on her next pass.
She stopped where she stood and looked at him, and what he saw in her face almost made him wish she hadn't. "Thank you, Magozzi," she said, and then started to pace again.
Knudsen finally signed off the phone and walked over to where Halloran was sitting. He scowled down at the burning cigarette, and Halloran glared back at him. "What," Halloran growled. He was spoiling for a fight, any kind of a fight. They all were.
"You got another one of those?" Knudsen pointed to the cigarette.
Halloran handed him the pack. "Never in a million years would I have pegged you for a smoker."
Knudsen lit up, took a drag, and coughed for a long time. "There are no nonsmokers in this business. Just people trying to quit, and people who haven't started yet. They've got the fire under control. My people are starting to move into what's left of Four Corners. The bomb squad and the computer expert should be here in thirty minutes." He took another drag and looked back toward the RV. "Monkeewrench," he recited the name painted on the side. "Those are the people traveling all over the place, donating their programs to law enforcement, right?"
"That's right."
"Huh. And you've got two of them on your force."
Halloran looked him straight in the eye. "They're kind of subcontract."
Knudsen almost smiled. "How good are they?"
"From what I hear, the best in the world."
"They'd better be. We're running out of time."
Within a few minutes, the field started to fill up with the people Knudsen had called in: a couple HAZMAT vans, sedans with more suits, and an ominous-looking black helicopter that had emptied out some ominous-looking men in black suits in the last five minutes. That contingent was standing in a tight, motionless group near the building. As far as Magozzi knew, they'd said a few words to Knudsen and hadn't talked to anyone since.
"Those guys give me the creeps," Gino said. "They all look like the bad guy inMatrix. Who are they, Knudsen?"
"Friends."
"Gee, could you be a little more specific?"
"No."
In the next minute, the sky filled with noise and a big, dirt-brown sky pig came in fast, beating all the grass in the far corner of the field down into a crop circle. It had barely touched down before men started tumbling out, then lumbering toward them. They were already in full gear-bulky, padded suits, sealed helmets, ninety pounds of protection weighing down each man.
"Don't they know the bomb's been deactivated?" Magozzi asked.
"They know," Knudsen said. "But there's still a brick of plastique in there. They'd come in like that if it were floating in the middle of a swimming pool. As far as they're concerned, no bomb is deactivated until they say it is."
"Goddamnit, that plastique is not going to blow, whether they believe it or not. You cannot let them go in there and start messing around while the Monkeewrench people are trying to . . ."
"For God's sake, Magozzi, I'm not a complete idiot," Knudsen interrupted, then trotted over to meet the bomb squad and the other men who had disembarked.
Magozzi sighed and looked at the trio from Kingsford County. Halloran and Bonar were standing close on either side of Sharon, who looked wired enough to start snapping apart. Magozzi figured they all looked a little bit like that.
There was a flurry of activity and voices for a few minutes while Knudsen made the rounds of the arrivals, barking out instructions like a drill sergeant. By the time he was finished, the field was remarkably silent. Magozzi looked around and felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. There had to be at least fifty people standing in a ragged semicircle around a building that looked as benign and harmless as a thousand other old farm buildings dotting the mid-western countryside. Nobody was doing anything; nobody was saying anything. They were all just staring at the door, waiting for it to open.
INSIDE the machine shed, Grace, Annie, and Harley hunched around Roadrunner at the computer, every unblinking eye fixed on the screen as pages of command codes scrolled by. A sheen of sweat washed Roadrunner's face as his twisted fingers talked to the keys, and then suddenly, his fingers froze and the scrolling stopped."What?" Harley demanded. "Did you find it? Is that the abort?" Roadrunner closed his eyes for a moment, then swiveled his chair to face them all. "There is no abort," he said quietly.
OUTSIDE the machine shed, the semicircle of silently waiting people let out a collective gasp as Harley came barreling out the door. He was moving at a perfectly amazing speed for a man that size, a blur of beard and tattoos and black leather as he raced past all of them into the RV. He came out five seconds later waving a disk and hollering, "There's no abort-we've gotta try something else!" He was back in the building so fast that it was hard to believe he'dever been out. Everyone was standing up, hearts pounding, legs ready to run somewhere if they only had a little direction.
"What do you suppose was on that disk?" Knudsen asked.
"God knows," Gino said.
"I'm going back in there," Magozzi said abruptly, heading for the door. He had license, he reasoned. He'd been in there before when things were really tense and hadn't messed anything up. Besides, this was driving him crazy. He had to know what was going on. He had to feel like he was part of it. He'd be very quiet. They'd never know he was there.
Sharon stared after him for a moment, muttered, "Well this is just bullshit," and followed him.
It was as if she had taken a cork out of a bottle. One by one, everyone in the field started to move toward the building and slip silently through the door.
ROADRUNNER'S LYCRA SUIT was soaked with sweat, and his leg jiggled furiously under the desk while he pushed the disk Harley had retrieved from the RV into the computer drive.
Grace eyed him worriedly. "Anything you want to run by us before you try this thing, Roadrunner?"
He shook his head hard and fast, keeping his fingers over the keyboard and his eyes fixed on the screen. "No time."
"Is this what you wouldn't let me get a look at in the office yesterday?"
"Yeah. It's just something Harley and I have been working on."
Annie forced herself to take a breath and blew the exhale up toward her bangs. "Are you saying you don't even know if itworks?"
"Are you kidding me?" Harley rumbled. "Of course it's going to work." He clapped Roadrunner on the back. "Go for it, my little chickadee."
Roadrunner pushed a few keys and started the disk loading, but Grace's eyes were on Harley. His voice had sounded strong and full of confidence, but there were bloodless white lines tracing around his moustache and down into his beard, and his eyes looked sad, almost hopeless.
"How much time does it take to load?" she asked quietly when Roadrunner had finished typing.
He punched a single key and brought up a time bar that started filling with blue color, millimeter by millimeter. "Five minutes, maybe. I don't know. We only did one test run."
"And then how long to execute?"
"I don't know." Roadrunner pulled his hands away from the keyboard and stared at the time bar. Everyone else was staring at the red countdown clock in the upper-right-hand corner of the screen.
37:22:19... 18... 17...
Jesus,Magozzi thought, moving a little closer to Grace, sensing her rather than seeing her because his eyes were fixed at the damn clock as it ticked down.It had to be wrong. It was going too damn fast.